Purchasing power USA vs. D

In my campaign to convince Americans to switch to renewable power, the higher cost is often an issue. I have long wondered why Americans are so worried about high prices when Europeans aren't.

One of the most interesting things about my visit to the US last summer was the feeling that prices were somehow much different. For instance, it only cost me around 260 dollars a week to rent a Prius, which – as I found out – starts at 22,800 dollars in the US. In Europe, the Prius starts at 25,750 euros, equivalent to over 34,000 dollars at the current exchange rate. In other words, the same car costs 50 percent more in Europe.

I wondered if that might be an anomaly with that particular car, but it's not. The Lexus RX 450 costs 43,000 dollars in the US but nearly 60,000 euros in Europe. Maybe it's just Asian imports? No, the Porsche Cayenne S Hybrid apparently goes for just under 68,000 dollars in the US but costs 79,000 euros in Europe. The Mercedes C 300 sells for 34,000 dollars in the US with all the extras, but it will cost you around 38,000 euros in Europe.

I wondered if the reason might also be that labor costs are greater in Europe, but it turns out that cars made in the US are simply of lower quality. For instance, Volkswagen now plans to sell the Passat in the US for around 20,000 dollars, with the cheapest version in Europe going for 24,425 euros (around 32,000 dollars). According to this report (in German), the car has a cheaper interior than the European version – though I have a hard time imagining a 50 percent price difference based on a cheaper dashboard, etc.

Under the hood and under the chassis, so to speak, we find additional reasons. For instance, the Volkswagen Jetta apparently has a cheaper rear axle in the US. I don't have all the details, but we begin to understand why Volkswagen has a reputation for being unreliable in the US – a reputation that will come as a bit of a surprise to Europeans.

It's not just cars either. The picture up above shows a 250 gram package of organic cherry tomatoes that I bought at a normal (not especially cheap) grocery store last fall. In the US, I had sticker shock when I saw what a pound of cherry tomatoes, which my daughter loves, costs. For roughly 453 grams, you have to pay four dollars, and they're not even organic -- that's nearly 0.90 dollars per 100 grams. The package above cost the equivalent of 1.67 dollars for 250 grams or around 67 cents. The non-organic tomatoes would, of course, be significantly cheaper.

Now have a look (and click to enlarge) at the second picture (yes, I told the people at my local bakery that I'd like to take a picture of their shelves). I was amazed to see that a loaf of bread in the US can easily cost four dollars, though you can certainly get a loaf of white bread at Walmart for closer to a dollar (see this discussion). If I remember correctly, a loaf of bread generally weighs around 24 ounces in the US, with some loafs coming in at 20 ounces. To make the math easy, 24 ounces is basically 1.5 pounds, which puts us at roughly 680 grams.

As you can see from the photo, you could get a loaf of K & U Sonne weighing 750 grams for 2.70 euros, which is basically 3.50 dollars, so not much cheaper than in the US. But the 1 kg loaf of Wiesentäler Brot to the left and above it is the one I usually buy (it makes really fantastic toast when it's a few days old); it runs me three euros. I don't think a fresh bakery can quite compete with loaves of white bread from Walmart, but fresh bread in Germany seems to be a good deal cheaper than the prepackaged stuff you get in the US.

Of course, prices vary wildly. For a liter of milk, I can pay 0.50 euros or 1.20 euros. The former puts me at about 2.50 dollars per gallon. But especially for fresh produce, the prices in the US were enough to make me want to eat meat. One reason may be that the produce section is often highly refrigerated and may even have tiny sprinkler systems in the US, whereas Europeans just set their produce out without any air conditioning or hydration system even in the summer.

So it's really hard to compare. When it comes to income tax, for instance, Germans are already paying 25 percent income tax at 48,000 euros, and the peak tax rate has already reached nearly 40 percent. In the US, at the equivalent 63,000 dollars you are only paying 17 percent income tax, and your peak rate is 25 percent. In return, universities are (practically) free in Germany, etc.

Peace, y'all

(Traditional sign from the French Quarter in New Orleans)

 

Harper's, you poor thing

That didn't take long:

Similarly, writers and editors, as Harper’s Magazine’s Thomas Frank points out, are being driven into penury by Internet wages — in most cases, no wages.... I have been radicalized, both as a publisher and a writer, and have instituted a “protectionist” policy in regard to the Internet and its free-content salesmen.

Does that mean that Harpers is going to take my money in return for access to their website (otherwise known as "paid subscription")? I think not.

Go Jon!

Jon Stewart interviews 9/11 first responders about how their healthcare has been filibustered.

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Bye-bye, New Yorker

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am a regular reader of the New Yorker. Until a few weeks ago, practically all of the magazine was available for free online, so I simply read everything online and provided gift subscriptions to friends in the US in return. The US annual subscription price is 40 dollars, whereas the international subscription rate is 120 dollars – and I do not need to hold the thing in my hand. Reading the articles online was fine for me; after all, I sit at my screen all day anyway.

But a few weeks ago, the New Yorker started charging for access to many full articles; only abstracts are online for free. So I signed up for the "digital edition," which costs the same as the US postal subscription, but you do not get anything in the mail. Essentially, it's what I wanted at Harpers, but they don't offer it.

Unfortunately, the digital edition of the New Yorker is a travesty. Check that first screenshot above from a 24-inch screen (click to enlarge) – this is what you see. They have essentially scanned in the print version, so you get a full two-page layout (I cannot find a way to make this thing visible as a single page), and the writing is simply too small to read. There is also no full-screen version; that you get both pages at a time on a part of your screen.

Granted, you can zoom in (see screenshot to the right), but the page is not scrollable; you have to drag the page down, and in doing so you need to be careful not to shift left and right too much lest you lose the beginnings or endings of columns. Need I point out that the three-column format, which may be useful in print versions where you can easily follow a column all the way down the page, is worthless on modern computers, whose screens are almost always much wider than they are long. Also, the text is no longer accessible as such; you are looking at an image – a major drawback for a blogger like me, who enjoys copying and pasting sections.

Of course, I could buy myself an iPad, but each issue there costs $4.99, which essentially means that you pay 250 dollars for an annual subscription – twice as much as for the international edition. And I'm not even sure that that offer is open to me over here in Europe. I own a Kindle, and although the New Yorker is available there, it is not available in Europe. I'm sure that licensing is the problem, but these publishers are shooting themselves in the foot. They complain about us not wanting to pay, but then they make illegal versions attractive by restricting access so much.

In short, this year my annual donation to the New Yorker does not go out as a subscription to anyone, but rather as digital access for myself, but I cannot use it. The New Yorker makes it practically impossible for me to read the magazine. They could have simply provided subscribers with access to an HTML page with the text. I was happy reading everything like that up to now. Hell, they could have made this readable via RSS or sent me the text by e-mail. I wouldn't have minded.

So if the authors of the New Yorker start complaining about how readers are not willing to pay for content, I will probably not even realize that they are complaining because I will no longer be reading the magazine even though I have a paid subscription.

Interesting twist on Wikileaks

From ForeignPolicy.org:

judging by my email traffic, not all American officials are all that upset. Some, in fact, are delighted with the whole affair, for reasons ranging from professional pride in their handiwork to the opportunity to air longstanding grievances over possibly wrongheaded public perceptions of foreign events.

Mono Lake - not of this world

Image via WikipediaA few years ago, I managed to visit Mono Lake and I made a pledge to myself that I would get my kids over to it one day.

Last summer, that dream came true. On a trip from Long Beach to San Francisco, through Yosemite, from Mono Lake to Las Vegas (where my boy turned 13) via Death Valley, over to the Grand Canyon, and back to Long Beach via Joshua Tree National Park, I told the kids that they would see at least three places that simply do not seem to be on the earth. One of them is Mono Lake (the other two are Joshua Tree NP and Yosemite, but actually Death Valley should be included; I simply had not been there before).

I told the kids to be on the lookout for places where Capt. Kirk could beam down with Spock, and no changes to the scenery would be necessary for us to believe they landed on a different planet.

Now, there is news that scientists have discovered a bacterium in Mono Lake that basically constitutes a new form of life. As one NASA scientist stated on television, we can go looking for ET now.

It should be kept in mind that Mono Lake was almost depleted to provide water to the city of Los Angeles, but environmentalists stepped in, and the lake is now gradually being refilled.

Imagine the loss had Mono Lake been drained. As of this writing, Wikipedia still contains the following sentence under "phosphorus": "Phosphorus is a key element in all known forms of life." As of today, that is no longer true. All forms of life use of phosphorus, and arsenic has a similar structure but is toxic to every living organism – except the one now discovered.

Phosphorus is used in farming (it is a main ingredient in fertilizer), and supplies of it are limited. Countries like Morocco are main exporters of the material. There is even a theory of "peak phosphorus"– the point where it will not be possible for the earth to have any additional living organisms for a lack of phosphorous (see this). The theory of peak phosphorus is quite mainstream now; see this article from April and Foreign Policy, which points out:

Nearly 90 percent of the world's estimated phosphorus reserves are found in five countries: Morocco, China, South Africa, Jordan, and the United States. In comparison, the 12 countries that make up the OPEC cartel control only 75 percent of the world's oil reserves.

The discovery of this new bacterium will not allow us to switch to arsenic when we are out of phosphorus, however. But it it is the kind of thing Spock and McCoy would have been fascinated to find, and which TV viewers would have thought too fanciful.

Related articles

• NASA's Announcement: Get Inspired With A Roadtrip To Mono Lake (huffingtonpost.com)